We Need to Talk about Kevin as if written by Jason Reynolds and Tananarive Due meets Model Home by Rivers Solomon in an innovative twist on the haunted house novel: about a mother desperate to protect her sons from the twin specters of gun violence and otherworldly menace in their public housing project.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson, which is out now.
Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate.
Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He’s a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.
But then, strange things start happening to Nona and other residents: mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons. Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely.
Nona has her secrets too. Her affair with the married church pastor has been weighing on her conscience, but that’s not the only guilt haunting her. She fears that someone—or something— is seeking revenge for an act she made in a moment of weakness to protect her family. And now everyone in Hester Gardens must pay the price . . .
EXCERPT
Only a few Hester Gardens townhomes faced north, and in Medford lore, they were the reason the public housing complex was haunted. When the sun rose on the eastern-facing units that overlooked the Rodgers Freeway, light poured into the tiny windows, baking the occupants from May through September and reminding them of summer the rest of the year. For the homes that faced west, the setting sun bathed the walls in eerie pinks and purples reminiscent of late-afternoon funerals down south. The handful of southern-facing dwellings were dim most of the day except around noon, when the sun was high enough to peek through curtains like an intrusive neighbor. But the haunted quarters were the ones facing north, or so everyone said. For those homes, the sun never seemed to rise, the days were cast in a never-ending pall of gray, and the murdered just didn’t know how to leave.
Nona McKinley’s unit faced north. On the morning of her middle son’s high school graduation, she showered, powdered herself, and primped in her bedroom mirror. It was a quarter past six, and she’d been up since four a.m. cleaning and fretting, filled with a range of emotions she couldn’t quite place. She fastened her favorite bra—the best of the three she owned because it crafted the deepest cleavage—and hummed along to a gospel tune flowing from the television Pastor Davis had bought her. The song had also played at her eldest son’s funeral.
Kendall.
That wound was still so raw.
Being home alone was a rare but welcome event. A full bed alongside a milk crate draped with a neighbor’s discarded curtains completed her room, and the makeshift nightstand housed her blessing oil and bible. The bars on the lone window and the narrowness of the room were her prison. Back when Vance still lived there, the space had seemed larger. His mere presence had stretched apart the walls and pushed up the ceiling.
She searched her closet for something that might dress up the outfit she would wear. At the back, she found the skirt she’d worn that day in the alley. It had taken her weeks to remove the blood- stains. Vance had made her promise not to throw it in the trash.
“I can burn it,” she’d offered.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he’d countered. “Just clean it and hang it again like you do with all of your clothes on a normal week.”
The memory of NaDarius came to her, of his hand reaching for her skirt, but she wouldn’t let him haunt her this day. Not at such a special moment. The occasion she’d been waiting for, when all of her hopes and dreams and backbreaking work were finally paying off.
She wasn’t expecting the boys to return home before the ceremony. In fact, she was set to meet them there. So when her front door groaned open and slammed shut, she drew in a breath and stared at the image of her own wide eyes.
With her bra hooked but backwards on her torso, she snapped off the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, and waited for familiar footsteps—deliberate if they belonged to Marcus, the graduate; dawdling if they were Lance’s, the middle schooler’s.
These footfalls were neither; they rushed across her floor as if set aflame.
Was it a junkie? Or one of the boys from the local gang, the Hester Boys, rummaging through her kitchen drawers? How would they have gotten in? She had wrought iron on the front door, and there were but two ways a person could force entry, one of which involved a screwdriver.
Only she, Marcus, and Lance had keys, and her boys would never lose nor loan theirs. She prayed it was Marcus stomping across the living-room floor, drawing closer to her room. Perhaps he’d forgotten the printout for his speech?
“Marcus?”
She didn’t like the way the movement stopped on the other side of the wall. The clock ticked louder than usual. Across the hall, the toilet bubbled. Sweat formed on her upper lip and about her temples, and she pressed her palm to her chest, hoping the gesture would calm her breathing.
No answer from the living room.
She rushed forward and pressed the dime-sized gold lock on her bedroom door. With trembling fingers almost too thick to work, she tugged her bra into place, slid on her blouse, and zipped her hips into her pencil skirt.
She tiptoed back to the dresser and quietly searched the top for her phone. Mable. She’d call Mable Cleveland. Mable lived several doors down in Hester Gardens and was always armed, even at funerals, even in line at the neighborhood food pantry. Where was Nona’s cell?
Blush brushes, BB cream, and her bottle of blue-black mascara covered the dresser top, but no phone. She eased open the top drawer in case the device had fallen in. It wasn’t there either.
Nerves stabbed her stomach and chest. She must have left it on the kitchen counter. Her only way to call for help was on the other side of her home, out where the steps gave way to a dragging sound, a heaviness being pulled across her floors.
“It’s me,” someone said. The voice moved to the hallway, outside her bedroom door. Closer. Louder. “It’s me.”
She snatched up the metal baseball bat she kept beside her bed, careful not to make a sound. She didn’t know who was on the other side of the thin wood, but the voice—deadpan, bass-heavy, and evil—didn’t belong to any of her sons.
How could such a flimsy lock keep her safe? She backed up, bumping her nightstand and knocking her bible to the floor. She regretted making Vance get rid of the revolver he’d kept in the milk crate.
Floorboards creaked on the other side of the door.
“You better get out of my house if you know what’s good for you.” She drew closer to the wood again, hoping to sound like a large, menacing person who had a weapon and perhaps also knew how to throw a punch, but her voice came out shrill and weak.
The doorknob rotated slowly, the motion barely emitting a sound. The handle squeaked in protest as someone moved it left, right, left, right. The lock Pastor had installed worked after all. The metal held.
When she didn’t open the door, the intruder violently shook it in its frame. A crack the size of a strand of hair appeared near the edge; it wouldn’t take much more pressure to break through. She wished she hadn’t told Pastor to install those irons on the bedroom windows and the front door. Now she had no way to get out.
She pressed her ear to the wood; the post of her stud earring dug into the flesh behind her lobe.
Everything came to a stop.
She brought the bat to her right shoulder anyway, gripping the handle and gearing up to swing. Her pulse throbbed against her temples. Tears burned the outer corners of her eyes. The clock beside the bedroom door ticked. As the red minute hand crept forward, the thin rod counted down the seconds until she came face to face with this prowler. She waited. Her pounding heart echoed in her ears.
